The Peter Thiel–backed candidate is running to disrupt, in his words, ‘decades of bipartisan failure.’ Can he help the GOP reclaim the Senate majority?
The Peter Thiel–backed candidate is running to disrupt, in his words, ‘decades of bipartisan failure.’ Can he help the GOP reclaim the Senate majority?
G oing into the final months of 2020, Arizona’s U.S. Senate race looked increasingly dire for the Grand Old Party. As the traditionally red Grand Canyon State — once the proud home of conservative folk hero Barry Goldwater — continued to trend leftward, embattled Republican incumbent Martha McSally was slipping precipitously in the polls. The 54-year-old freshman had an admirable background as the first female commander of an Air Force fighter squadron but a weak presence on the stump, and a confusing campaign message that fluctuated between Trumpy populism and moderate pro-business conservatism. What’s more, McSally had never won a statewide election: She lost her first Senate bid to Kyrsten Sinema in 2018 before leveraging her connections in the Arizona GOP to be appointed to John McCain’s former seat the following year — a serious strategic error on the part of the local party apparatus, given the senator’s dearth of political je ne sais quoi. Her success or failure in fending off Mark Kelly, a formidable Democratic challenger with a pedigree as a former NASA astronaut and Navy combat veteran, would be decisive in determining the balance of the upper chamber of Congress.
From his perch in Sedona, Blake Masters could see the writing on the wall. “We need to keep this seat Republican,” he told the Arizona Republic in late 2019. “And we need a GOP that puts voters before donors. Martha McSally lost a winnable race last year. If I come to believe that she can’t win next November, I’ll run.”
Masters, a young yet influential figure on the tech-start-up and investing scenes, represented a dynamic alternative to McSally’s stiff brand of Beltway Republicanism. A primary challenge from him would have pitted a political outsider representing the GOP’s insurgent populist wing against an insider. But by early 2020, Masters was striking a different tone, putting rumors of a possible primary challenge to bed. “On the one hand, I suspected that she probably wasn’t going to win, so that was the temptation to run,” he tells National Review. “But on the other hand, I didn’t see the path to victory for me [either]. You know, President Trump was supporting her. McConnell was supporting her. It would have been really tough.”
McSally went on to lose the general election by almost 80,000 votes — 48.8 percent to Kelly’s 51.2 percent — giving Democrats both of Arizona’s U.S. Senate seats for the first time since 1952.
Could Masters have actually won where McSally lost? “We can’t know the counterfactual,” he says. But Kelly is up for election again in 2022 — the special election in 2020 was for who would finish out John McCain’s term — and this time, “there is no Republican incumbent,” Masters says. “I’ve gotten better. I’ve prepared myself to be able to run well, raise money, and convey the right message. And so I think now’s the time.”
In July, Masters officially announced that he would be seeking the Republican nomination for that 2022 race, once again a crucial contest in the battle for Senate control. There are reasons to think he’s a serious contender — most notably, perhaps, a cool $10 million donation from Peter Thiel, the PayPal-founder-turned-venture-capital-billionaire and Republican mega-donor who is one of Masters’s longtime mentors and business associates. Masters and Thiel met in 2012, when Thiel was teaching a class at Stanford, where Masters was then an undergraduate. The two quickly hit it off. And when Masters posted the detailed notes that he took in Thiel’s class on his blog, they went viral. He and Thiel turned that set of notes into a book they co-authored in 2014, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, which “begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice.”
Fast-forward to 2021: Masters, who turned 35 in August, is the chief operating officer at Thiel Capital and the president of the Thiel Foundation. But even as he has rapidly risen through the ranks of the Silicon Valley elite, he sees a worsening of the broader endemic issues that Zero to One identified in American life. “The thinking behind the book and just the countless conversations I’ve had with Peter over the years have really been instrumental in forming my political outlook and beliefs,” Masters tells National Review. “I mean, I really do think we’ve been stagnating as a society. We’ve been failing to make the investments and do the hard work to guarantee the conditions for future success. I see things falling apart.”
“I don’t think it’s just the last nine or ten months of Biden-Harris, although yes, that’s been a disaster,” Masters says. “I actually think this has been decades in the making, maybe going all the way back to the ’60s. And for the most part, our politicians have been unresponsive to it. People have been in zombie mode, just kind of asleep at the wheel. We need new energy. We need to be innovative.”
This skepticism of recent narratives of “progress” — “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” as Thiel famously put it in his 2011 manifesto on American decline — puts the Zero to One authors at odds with mainstream progressivism and mainstream conservatism alike. Although both are decisively on the political right, Thiel and Masters represent a considerably different brand of politics than the one that is predominant in most conservative legacy institutions. That heterodox political outlook — forward-looking entrepreneurial futurism meets skeptical conservative traditionalism — is evident from the beginning of the notes Masters took of Thiel’s Stanford lectures, which formed the basis of the best-selling book Zero to One:
The zenith of optimism about the future of technology might have been the 1960’s. People believed in the future. They thought about the future. Many were supremely confident that the next 50 years would be a half-century of unprecedented technological progress.
But with the exception of the computer industry, it wasn’t. Per capita incomes are still rising, but that rate is starkly decelerating. Median wages have been stagnant since 1973. People find themselves in an alarming Alice-in-Wonderland-style scenario in which they must run harder and harder — that is, work longer hours — just to stay in the same place. This deceleration is complex, and wage data alone don’t explain it. But they do support the general sense that the rapid progress of the last 200 years is slowing all too quickly.
So, what is to be done? Amid what some are calling — with ample evidence — a working-class realignment of the Republican Party, Masters professes a version of what has come to be described as “populist” or “nationalist” conservatism, advocating a set of policy prescriptions and political priorities that have been getting increasing attention since Donald Trump’s 2016 upset victory: hawkishness on immigration over the Cato Institute–style permissiveness, military restraint over neoconservative nation-building, industrial policy and trade protectionism over free trade and free markets, a newfound skepticism of increasingly activist Fortune 500 corporations and the concentrated power of Big Tech, and a renewed interest in cultural issues such as critical race theory in public schools over other Republican priorities such as tax cuts and deregulation. “Intellectual policy circles have been sort of talking about these questions for a long time, maybe kicking off right around when Trump won in 2016,” Masters says. “I think people realize it can’t just be procedural anymore. It can’t just be doing tax cuts and deregulation and assuming that everything will work out. Even though I think that tax cuts are generally pretty good, and I’m generally not a huge fan of regulation, we need to get back to talking about, ‘what does a good society look like?’”
For Masters, that vision of a good society can be described in a simple sentence: “In America, you should be able to raise a family on one single income.” That’s one of the advertisements he’s been running in Arizona, and it’s his mantra on the campaign trial. It’s not a slogan that one would expect to hear from a conservative running in a Republican primary — but out on the stump, “it’s an applause line,” Masters says. “It’s an interesting applause line, though, because it’s not something that immediately lights up in the audience’s brain as recognizable, so it takes maybe a second to digest. But then people realize, like, ‘No, that’s really good. That’s really conservative.’ It’s just a little interesting because Republican politicians don’t usually talk that way. And frankly, neither do Democrat politicians, at least not anymore.”
In the post-Trump era, there is an increasingly sharp contrast between the so-called New Right — a catch-all term that includes everyone from reform-minded conservatives like Thiel and Masters to hardline reactionaries to monarchists to Catholic integralists — and traditional pro-business Republicans. Thiel — a unique figure in the Republican donor class, which typically prefers Chamber of Commerce–style candidates over their more populist counterparts — is disproportionately responsible for bankrolling the New Right, throwing his considerable financial weight behind young candidates running on realignment-style platforms across the country. Masters is one of those candidates; J. D. Vance, another Thiel protégé running for Ohio’s open Senate seat in 2022, is another. For his Senate race, as well as his prior race for Missouri attorney general, Josh Hawley courted the billionaire, who donated hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a darling of establishment Republicans and populists alike, is said to be in talks with Thiel.
At the same time, legacy conservative groups have been more reluctant to get behind the GOP’s ascendant nationalist wing. Notably, the Club for Growth has signaled that it would endorse Arizona representative Andy Biggs, a more standard Freedom Caucus congressman, if he were to enter the 2022 Arizona Senate primary.
Navigating these new divisions can be difficult. Masters has already courted controversy on multiple occasions — most recently, by running an advertisement stating that “Trump won in 2020” and that “election integrity is the most important issue, and we’ve got to do so much better if we want to keep this country great.” He ran that ad after an Arizona audit had already confirmed Biden’s victory over Trump in disputed Maricopa County. Within 24 hours of the video’s posting on Twitter, the Arizona Democratic Party released a statement blasting Masters for “baseless conspiracies that are damaging to our democracy.” And the ad invited criticism from some conservatives, too: In The Week, columnist Samuel Goldman wrote that Masters was playing “a dangerous game” and that “the disgraceful video is characteristic of highbrow populists who see Trump as a vehicle for their own vision of national restoration.”
“I’m not going to pretend that I know exactly how many legal and illegal votes Joe Biden got or something — I don’t,” Masters tells NR when asked about the ad. “But I saw so much that was off, that was irregular, that was either borderline fraud or obviously indicative of some kind of fraud, I’m just gonna call it out and say it: I think it was not a free and fair election.”
Masters’s approach illustrates one of the persistent challenges for the new generation of populist candidates: how to appeal to the natural constituency for their brand of right-wing nationalism — i.e., the Trump base — without completely alienating the political elites alongside which they will need to work if they make it to Washington, D.C. Running as an outsider plays well on the campaign trail, but delivering on one’s political priorities also requires an ability to work within the system. This is, and has always been, the paradox of populist politics: It is dependent on class traitors — members of the very elite that it seeks to depose — to be successful.
Masters freely admits this — but he doesn’t think it’s a contradiction. “I do think we’ve had decades of bipartisan failure from our elite class,” he tells NR. “But politics is always an elite game. I think the question is, where’s your heart really?”
“I just really believe in looking out for most Americans who aren’t able to get to the successful narrow zones on the Coast,” he says. “Normal people in the heartland, everyday people, I think our political system does not look out for them. It doesn’t respond to their interests. So I’m interested in changing that.”